Television has become the key element in the advertising program for many companies. Billions of dollars are invested in communicating a product message to the viewing audience. Advertisers who spend such huge sums of money understandably want to determine whether their money is being well spent and, if not, how improvements can be made. Feedback to assess whether an advertising campaign is working is desired. Information such as was a targeted portion of the public exposed to the campaign as planned and did the public find the advertisement favorable is valuable to the advertisers.
Various techniques are currently available to provide information of this nature. However, each of these suffers from various drawbacks. One of the earliest techniques involved conducting interviews with television viewers to determine their exposure to a particular advertisement and whether they had a favorable impression of the advertisement. This approach, however, required finding television viewers willing to participate in sometimes long surveys at inconvenient times. In addition, results obtained with this technique were suspect because of the heavy reliance on memory, and on the viewer's inclination to be biased in favor of what is of interest to the interviewer. Current audience measurement systems eliminate the need for participating in surveys at inconvenient times and the element of bias, but require participating households to have their television sets and video playback devices to be disassembled and hard-wired with viewing monitoring circuitry.